I was a speaker last month at the Pragmatic Summit in San Francisco, where I participated in a fireside chat session about Agentic Engineering hosted by Eric Lui from Statsig. The video is available on YouTube . Here are my highlights from the conversation. Stages of AI adoption We started by talking about the different phases a software developer goes through in adopting AI coding tools. 02:45 I feel like there are different stages of AI adoption as a programmer. You star...

I tend to focus on the origin of the computer within the military. Particularly in the early days of digital computing, the military was a key customer, and fundamental concepts of modern computing arose in universities and laboratories serving military contracts. Of course, the war would not last forever, and computing had applications in so many other fields—fields that, nonetheless, started out as beneficiaries of military largesse. Consider education. The Second World War had a profound ...

I wanted to explore the extent to which Claude Code could build a data pipeline using dbt without iterative prompting. What difference did skills, models, and the prompt itself make? I’ve written in a separate post about what I found ( yes it’s good; no it’s not going to replace data engineers, yet ). In this post I’m going to show how I ran these tests (with Claude) and analysed the results (using Claude), including a pretty dashboard (created by Claude): I wanted to ...

I saw this while perusing my RSS feeds last night, and thought it was interesting. In all honesty, I've completely moved away from WordPress since all the drama a while ago. But this is quite cool - My WordPress is basically a version of WordPress that runs entirely in your browser. You visit my.wordpress.net it downloads some files to your machine, and you have WordPress - no install, no sign up. Just a private WordPress instance in your browser that only you can visit. Obviously if y...

In late January, I published a post 1 ( archive ) on the Databricks engineering blog about “SAFE”, the feature flagging and experimentation platform I’ve been working on for the past few years. SAFE is what I’ve been spending most of my time on during my time at Databricks, and it’s been rewarding to see the project grow from an initial prototype to a mature internal platform. I’ve been the tech lead for SAFE for a while now, and the project has scaled significantly in headcount,...

How isogenies can solve Bitcoin's Quantum problems How isogenies can solve Bitcoin's Quantum problems

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Last week we simulated a queueing algorithm. Behind the scenes, I did this by writing a Go program and placing sleeps to simulate processing. This meant that running a simulation took a while. I ran each one for about a minute, and adding more simulations where I varied parameters took longer and longer. How might we run simulations that don't use the real computer clock? One way to model such a thing is as a stream of events , which is a stream of tuples of (time passed before something ha...

All my clients wanted a carousel, now it's an AI chatbot! 2026-03-14 12:55 It always starts the same way. The client pulls out their phone mid-meeting, navigates to a competitor's website, and holds the screen up like evidence. "You see? They have one of those." A little bubble. Bottom right corner. Blinking... For years, that gesture was about carousels. Every homepage had to have one, big, slow, full of stock photos that nobody asked for. I built dozens of them. They spun. They faded. ...

I’ve been writing a lot of Go gRPC services these days at work - database proxies, metadata services, storage orchestration control plane, etc. They require me to go a bit deeper into protobuf and Go gRPC tooling than you’d typically need to. So I started poking around OSS gRPC codebases to pick up conventions. I was mainly looking for pointers on how to organize protobuf definitions, wire up server-side metrics and interceptors, and build ergonomic client wrappers. The default answer here...

The last time I covered the science of humanoid robots, the state of the art looked downright Orwellian — by which I mean, “four legs good, two legs bad.” It was 2015. Boston Dynamics’ first “Spot” quadruped had taken YouTube by storm, confidently trotting up stairs and recovering from vicious kicks. Also popular at the time: humanoids falling down. Constantly. I felt sorrier for those tottering… Source The last time I covered the science of humanoid robots, the state of the art...

“I know we are going to take a very long road, into darkness; but I know I can't turn back.” ― The Lord of the Rings Black Abyss Waitomo is mostly known for their glowworm caves. Most people book a short boat ride to view the countless New Zealand glowworms ( Arachnocampa luminosa ). I probably wouldn't include this activity in my trip if there wasn't a much more adventurous alternative: the Black Abyss , a caving tour. After putting on a wetsuit, you start with a 35 m a...

This week on the People and Blogs series we have an interview with Patrick Rhone, whose blog can be found at patrickrhone.net . Tired of RSS? Read this in your browser or sign up for the newsletter . People and Blogs is supported by the "One a Month" club members. If you enjoy P&B, consider becoming one for as little as 1 dollar a month. Let's start from the basics: can you introduce yourself? My name is Patrick Rhone. When I'm not tryi...

There is a certain kind of computer review that is really a permission slip. It tells you what you’re allowed to want. It locates you in a taxonomy — student, creative, professional, power user — and assigns you a product. It is helpful. It is responsible. It has very little interest in what you might become. The MacBook Neo has attracted a lot of these reviews. The consensus is reasonable: $599, A18 Pro, 8GB RAM, stripped-down I/O. A Chromebook killer, a first laptop, a sensible machi...

Tech firm fined $1.1m by California for selling high-school students’ data I agree with Brian Marick’s response No such story should be published without a comparison of the fine to the company’s previous year revenue and profits, or valuation of last funding round. (I could only find a valuation of $11.0M in 2017.) We desperately need corporations’ attitudes to shift from “lawbreaking is a low-risk cost of doing business; we get a net profit anyway” to “this could ...

Turing Award winner and former Oxford professor  Tony Hoare passed away last Thursday at the age of 92. Hoare is famous for quicksort, ALGOL, Hoare logic and so much more. Jim Miles gives his personal reflections. Jill Hoare, Tony Hoare, Jim Miles. Cambridge, 7 September 2021 Last Thursday (5th March 2026), Tony Hoare passed away, at the age of 92. He made many important contributions to Computer Science, which go well beyond just the one for which most Maths/CompSci undergraduates might know ...

Port of Salalah in Oman on fire following an Iranian drone attack. Via OSINTdefender on Twitter . Welcome to the reading list, a weekly roundup of news and links related to buildings, infrastructure, and industrial technology. This week we look at closure of the Strait of Hormuz, banning build-to-rent homes in the US, Honda’s EV losses, Travis Kalanick’s new company, Corpus Christi’s water crisis, and more. Roughly 2/3rds of the reading list is paywalled, so for full access become a paid ...

The eight-hour work week, its limitations and the importance of living outside the office. The eight-hour work week, its limitations and the importance of living outside the office.

Recently I came into posession of a few Apple Xserves. The one in question today is an Xserve G5, RackMac3,1 , which was built when Apple at the top—and bottom—of it's PowerPC era. This isn't the first Xserve—that honor belongs to the G4 1 . And it wasn't the last—there were a few generations of Intel Xeon-powered RackMacs that followed. But in my opinion, it was the most interesting. Unfortunately, being manufactured in 2004, this Mac's Delta power supply suffers from the Cap...

TL;DR; No - AI won’t kill open source, but it will reshape it. Small, single-purpose packages (micro open source) are likely to languish as AI agents write trivial utility code on the fly. But major frameworks, databases, and runtimes like Django, Postgres, and Python itself aren’t going anywhere - AI agents actually prefer reaching for established building blocks over reinventing them. The key is staying in the architect’s seat. AI will replace the trivial, leave the foundational, a...

How far can you go with IX Route Servers only? On paper internet exchanges (IX) are very simple in their implementation, simply put together a bunch of routers on a shared layer 2 ethernet switch How far can you go with IX Route Servers only? On paper internet exchanges (IX) are very simple in their implementation, simply put together a bunch of routers on a shared layer 2 ethernet switch How far can you go with IX Route Servers only? On paper internet exchanges (IX) are very simp...

Years in the jet teach you one thing above all else: the enemy gets a vote. I spent the better part of my career strapped into an F-16, training day in and day out to be ready when the call came. Air combat doesn’t sit still. Every generation brings new aircraft, new tactics, new threats. For decades, we owned the skies because our platforms, our training, and our operational concepts set the pace. That edge has eroded as near-peer adversaries have built modern fighters and layered air defen...

Whenever I have Claude do something for me, I feel nothing about the results. It feels like something happens around me, not through me. That's the new level of abstraction: you stop writing code and start describing intent. You stop crafting and start delegating. I've been doing this professionally long enough to have an opinion, and I don't like what it's doing to me. All of it focuses on getting things done rather than on quality or craft. I'm more productive than I've ever been. ...